Messengers: Distributed Programming using Mobile Agents

Messengers are agents, each capable of navigating through the underlying network and performing various tasks at each node. Their use facilitates a programming paradigm shift allowing applications to be written not as collections of communicating processes but from the point of view of each Messenger as it navigates through the system. Using several different applications, we demonstrate the MESSENGERS programming style and its implications for distributed programming. The advantages of programming in MESSENGERS include the ability to compute in unknown network topologies, the ability to modify or extend the applications' functional capabilities at runtime, and the ability to dynamically exploit computational resources. Furthermore, MESSENGERS programs result in a smaller semantic gap between the abstract algorithms and their implementations, which makes program construction a more intuitive process.